Description

As we enter the Bicentennial anniversary year commemorating out nation's independence, a flood of scholarly writings on the Revolutionary War is being turned out by book publishers and scholarly periodicals. One special conference after another, together with a larger-than-usual number of sessions at the annual convention meetings of the major professional history organizations, is devoted to an examination of our Revolutionary heritage. In recent years historians have begun to ask new questions about the circumstances that surrounded the achievement of American independence, have begun to examine the everyday aspects of life and death in that era, have emphasized the study of society "from the bottom up" instead of "from the top down," and have sharpened their analytical skills through the use of new kinds of evidence and new kinds of tools such as computer-assisted statistical runs. With the plethora of conference proceedings, articles and books now becoming readily available to the interested reader-enough to satisfy even the most gluttonous reading appetite - why should this publication be so presumptuous as to claim a degree of uniqueness that warrants attention by scholars, students and interested laymen? Somehow in the midst of our celebratory scholarship, the military history of the American Revolution, while certainly not being neglected by historians, has not been accorded a great deal of interest by the reading public. Perhaps that is because in the minds of many people so much of past military history has been "blood-and-guts" battle history or self-serving accounts of how various high-ranking generals, by dint of fortune or ability, managed almost single handedly to "win" this or that war. Perhaps also our reaction to recent American military involvements has caused an involuntary shrinking away from the study of military history except by dedicated professional historians or by polemicists seeking evidence to support their belief that all military activities are evil and antithetical to basic societal morality. Despite popular conceptions, not all military history is traditional battle history or memoirs. Mary military historians are asking the same questions of their subject material and using the same new analytical tools as are their compatriot scholars in other areas of historical research. They also are looking at history from the bottom up to discover the roles of such neglected groups as women, children, Blacks and common soldiers in the various wartime generations. They also are examining more closely the decision-making process to discover why civilian leaders, commanders and soldiers act as they do.show more